Marketing – It Seemed Like A Good Idea
It wasn’t math, or finance, or economics (eek) When you stumbled upon a creative and fast growing field you took a deep breath and thought…”Wow, there really is a place in this world for me”. Unfortunately, all that was a lie, and I hope you like sales. Don’t worry, if you’re reading this, it’s probably not too late.
Nobody Is Impressed By Your Internship
It’s no coincidence that marketing is a highly competitive field. While the growth of Marketing Managers is only expected to grow 9% in the next 10 years, the number of marketing graduates has risen over 35% in just the last few sun cycles. The demand for highly skilled professionals in the marketing field is prevalent, but qualified candidates are increasingly hard to find. You’re probably thinking to yourself, “..but wait, I’m qualified, competent, and hungry to prove myself!”. Like most things you do unimpressively, making money is not one that you can sweep under the rug, and because of that, you will start at the bottom. For better or worse, when you’re a marketing graduate, you’re going to be starting in sales.
Your Professors Lied To You
“More that 25,000 students earned undergraduate degrees in marketing last year. Yet fewer than one in five thousand found new jobs where they could directly apply their marketing skills, according to statisticians, college placement officers and company recruiters. “
The marketing world is a lot different than the reality painted in college marketing courses. While you whizzed away your time analyzing markets, creating focus groups, and building promotional packages in order to quantify metrics you could pretend were real, the outside world was doing circles around you. At the entry level, your chances of landing a job where the skills you practiced in college will be utilized are about 1 in 5000. In other words (or useless statistics), you are just as likely to die in a car crash as you are landing a job relevant to your college coursework. One of the most critical and new pieces of working in marketing is big data, and chances are your experience is probably zero.
Recruiters, They Also Lied To You.
If you’re not good at reading tarot cards, and you enjoy giving people misguided information that could drastically change the course of one’s life, there’s always a place for you in recruiting. I don’t blame recruiters for their information woes, because according to an unenforceable fact circulating the internet, an American Marketing Association study found that 90% of 300 college administrators surveyed thought marketing was selling. See how easy it is to be transparently ambiguous?
Please, Do Not Go Back To Back To School
It is not going to help. While many large companies only hire M.B.A’s in professional marketing roles, it still doesn’t guarantee you a job. Problematically, as an undergrad, you’ll be competing with these same sandbaggers who are forced to seek positions for which they are overqualified. Even having an M.B.A has lost respect because employers realize that no textbook will ever provide you the preparation for working with concrete data, dynamic conditions, and the stress of solving problems that carry a real risk.
So You’re Saying I Should Just Quit Now?
The point here is that when facing the world, your goals need to align with a reality in a way that can provide you a strategic approach. Wasting time applying for jobs you are exceptionally unqualified for is wasting everyone’s time, most importantly yours. This may mean having to apply and accept jobs in fields that you feel overqualified for in order to prove that your skills are both versatile and valued.